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Cascading-Creative-Contracts
Cascading-Creative-Contracts (or CCC), is a new methodology for intellectual property management. It is designed to be used by artists, scientists and innovators of all kinds who wish to retain ownership for their creations and ideas, and be able to benefit from them in a financial or any other manner, without being ripped off by big corporations, publishers and other barons. Concept The concept behind Cascading-Creative-Contracts is based on the fact that creative thought is both these seemingly contradicting things: * The original thoughts of individuals * An expression of an informal social process In other words, while it is true that new ideas, original artworks and ground braking innovations can almost always be attributed to a specific person, no idea or creation stands by itself. People with creative minds are always motivated by challenges they see around them, inspired by other creative minds and bring their thoughts into life trough cooperation with others. This is more even so when we refer to complex creations such as musical pieces or cinema productions, or technological projects. For example, musical artworks, weather sang or instrumental, are usually created by a group of artists and professionals, in a graduate, or cascading, process. A typical song, for instance, usually begins with either a composer that creates a melody, or with a song writer that creates a lyric. Then composer and song writer work together to match words to music. The next step is usually arrangement. Someone decides which voices and musical instruments will be used and adds the harmonic dimension to the new artwork, then come the performing artists and create the real music and finally it is all being mixed and distributed. Of course, the above description is somewhat simplistic as there be many variants to this working manner. Some of the roles may be performed by the same person, the process may not be all that linear and some phases may overlap. But still, the main principle remains that the creation of musical artworks is a cascaded assembly process. Accordingly, a cascading creative contract is actually an assembly of individual contracts (or microcontracts) that are signed between the people who participate in a creative process. Each partial contract in the assembly, facilitates terms and conditions between two or more intellectual property owners of elements of the final outcome. The most crucial difference between cascading creative contracts and the kind of contracts that are singed in conventional intellectual property management processes, is that when cascading creative contracts are used, the original creators always remain the owners of their artistic properties and copyrights. What is bought and sold in the process are RTU licenses. Thus, if for example a song writer signs a microcontract with a composer then: *The song writer remains the copyright owner of the lyric *The composer remains the copyright owner of the music *Other artists who wish to use the composed lyric must sign a microcontract with both the song writer and the composer. What this means in practice is that the song writer and the composer now share a RTU license for the composed lyric. This is as if they are both share holders in a miniature business. The microcontract facilitates the portion of the shares that each of them own and some other issues such as the terms under which each of them may sign another microcontract for his portion of the piece (for example, a song writer may agree that the same music will be used as an instrumental piece only, in return to still getting some portion of the incomes on the instrumental version). The critical difference here, is in the way the innovative and creative processes, and the commercial processes are connected to one another. In the conventional processes, weather that of copyright trading or that of patenting and patent breeching rights, monetary and other terms are based on interpretation of the law, which means complex contracts high legal costs and lots of red tape - and it is clear why under these conditions, everything is based on long term and very strict contracts. On the other hand, the cascading-creative-contract system is based on a set of simple and unified contracts in which terms are determined by negotiation in a manner that very much resembles stock exchange.